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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
  Yggdrasil Network

 beeflet wrote 13 hours 41 min ago:
 Still reading about this. Something strange is that ygg addresses are
 made to fit in ipv6 using the hash of a pubkey. How does vanity mining
 lead to any security benefit?
 
 Why not just make a new TLD like .onion or .i2p and use base32?

 coppsilgold wrote 15 hours 41 min ago:
 If you want an actual mesh p2p IP-network that can punch through
 firewalls/NATs you can use Tailscale/Headscale
 
 If you want a crypto-key addressable p2p connection-network there is a
 somewhat recent project which does this rather well: [1] It punches
 through firewalls/NATs and establishes QUIC connections.
 
 They have two already useful PoC's: [2]
 
 [1]: https://www.iroh.computer
 [2]: https://github.com/n0-computer/sendme
 [3]: https://github.com/n0-computer/dumbpipe
 dang wrote 18 hours 31 min ago:
 Related:
 
 Yggdrasil Network - [1] - Sept 2024 (3 comments)
 
 Yggdrasil P2P mesh E2EE IPv6 network - [2] - Jan 2022 (77 comments)
 
 Yggdrasil – Early-stage implementation of an end-to-end encrypted
 IPv6 network - [3] - June 2021 (102 comments)
 
 Show HN: Yggdrasil Network – compact mesh routing experiment for mesh
 networks - [4] - Jan 2019 (15 comments)
 
 Announcing Yggdrasil Network v0.3 - [5] - Dec 2018 (3 comments)
 
 Yggdrasil: End-To-end Encrypted IPv6 Networking - [6] - Dec 2018 (1
 comment)
 
 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41669625
 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30156551
 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27577201
 [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18863554
 [5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18751991
 [6]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18666245
 block_dagger wrote 19 hours 1 min ago:
 Came in thinking this was an extension for the game Valheim. Different
 yggdrasil apparently.

   jeroenhd wrote 15 hours 56 min ago:
   Yggdrasill is a name from Norse mythology. It's the tree along which
   the nine worlds were believed to exist.

 epapsiou wrote 19 hours 58 min ago:
 50 comments and no one mentioned Treeship or Hyperion!!

   gautamcgoel wrote 17 hours 18 min ago:
   Yeah, this is what I was thinking! The Templars would be so
   disappointed...

 varunnrao wrote 20 hours 16 min ago:
 This is not a technical point but does anyone know which font was used
 to typeset the logo? It looks really nice and clean.

 myspeed wrote 20 hours 23 min ago:
 Sounds like Teredo tunnels which was part of Windows 7. It builds ipv6
 tunnel over ipv4 and assigns a global IPv6 address to Windows machines.
 But these tunnels were later removed from Windows 10.

 jcmontx wrote 20 hours 58 min ago:
 I don't know a lot about networking. Where does this stand in the
 networking layers? Transport? Network?

 omani wrote 21 hours 37 min ago:
 something else in this space includes (New Kind of Network) NKN. ( [1]
 )
 
 [1]: https://nkn.org
 pjmlp wrote 21 hours 55 min ago:
 And me thinking it was a Linux distribution.
 
 [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X
 A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote 22 hours 3 min ago:
 FAQ >> Is Yggdrasil anonymous? No, it is not a goal of the Yggdrasil
 project to provide anonymity.
 
 I understand that the problem is hard, has its own set of issues to
 solve beyond just technical, but this honestly makes it a non-starter
 for me. Anything that would be an actual internet evolution would need
 to include actual anonymity. Apart from this, I simply do not see what
 problem it actually solves for the existing internet that is not
 already solved with the current setup.

   cma wrote 12 hours 57 min ago:
   Optimized latency can deanonymize, so better to layer anonymization
   on top.

   ravenstine wrote 14 hours 10 min ago:
   Why? I think it makes perfect sense to focus on a mesh routing
   protocol and make anonymity something optional that you can lay on
   top of it. No reason you can't run a Yggdrasil network and have an
   I2P network within it. This way there isn't as much of a performance
   hit for communications that don't call for anonymity, and anonymous
   peers can be established without being on the clearnet.

   neilalexander wrote 21 hours 27 min ago:
   Anonymity isn’t a goal for Yggdrasil anymore than it is a goal for
   for BGP, OSPF, BATMAN etc. Anonymous networks also generally have
   very high costs/overheads as they often engineer long and indirect
   paths for obscurity. See the generally poor performance/reliability
   of Tor circuits for an example of why we probably wouldn’t want the
   entire Internet to work this way.

 foundry27 wrote 22 hours 17 min ago:
 The first thing I tried to find on their website and their GitHub was a
 protocol specification, to be able to implement it independently from
 the reference implementation. I thought this would be straightforward
 since it’s advertised as a scheme/protocol, but such a spec isn’t
 referenced anywhere! Digging on my own I eventually found [1] on a
 side-branch of one of their other GitHub projects.
 
 Kudos to the author: I think it actually covers a lot of what you’d
 need to know: crypto identities, message formats, wire protocols,
 peering and stream semantics, spanning tree updates and root selection,
 the DHT, forwarding logic, sessions, etc. A couple things are TODOs
 like how to verify and sign root updates, and there’s some ambiguity
 in the tiebreaker algorithm for next-hop selection.
 
 It seems to be very tightly coupled to TCP as the transport layer
 though, since all packets need to be delivered reliably and in the
 order they were sent, and need to be capable of being fragmented into
 smaller packets for varying MTU sizes.
 
 [1]: https://github.com/yggdrasil-network/yggdrasil-specs/blob/ys00...
   colordrops wrote 21 hours 4 min ago:
   Is coupling with TCP a problem? Does it do anything that goes against
   their goal of full decentralization?

     macawfish wrote 21 hours 0 min ago:
     Makes it hard to do hole punching I think? At any rate, direct
     connections currently cannot be established between multi-hop
     peers, traffic gets routed through peers instead. I think this has
     something to do with the TCP choice.

       AyyEye wrote 16 hours 9 min ago:
       > At any rate, direct connections currently cannot be established
       between multi-hop peers, traffic gets routed through peers
       instead. I think this has something to do with the TCP choice.
       
       Yggdrasil is designed for physical links and multi-hop routing
       first and foremost. Internet peering is just a way to
       test/use/join the network until then.

         macawfish wrote 7 hours 8 min ago:
         I'd love if my private nodes could peer directly so I wouldn't
         need to route all traffic through my budget VPs.

           wolletd wrote 3 hours 45 min ago:
           If only there was some technology that would allow every peer
           to have its globally unique address, making direct
           connections only a matter of firewalls.
           
           I don't know, something like IPv4, but with more addresses...

       Karrot_Kream wrote 18 hours 53 min ago:
       I think this is a pragmatic choice. NAT Hole Punching can be hit
       or miss no matter the method but doing peer routing guarantees
       even a client that can only initiate outbound connections can
       route packets. It can be slow though.
       
       I also know there's support for other transports like QUIC but
       TCP is the main default.

       foundry27 wrote 18 hours 59 min ago:
       Yeaaah. TCP hole punching is goofy and unreliable, last I
       checked. You have to do some arcane ritual of having both peers
       start a three-way handshake to each others’s public endpoints
       simultaneously, relying on NATs to accept inbound SYN packets if
       they match the outgoing SYN. And nobody’s NAT devices implement
       simultaneous-open the same way, so all your connections just
       fail.
       
       Naturally this leads to slapping even more arcane fixes on top of
       that, like NAT port assignment oracles to  adversarial
       interoperate with different port allocation strategies (random,
       sequential, single, etc.) by analyzing patterns in previous port
       assignments. Networking sucks.

         beeflet wrote 13 hours 35 min ago:
         
         
         [1]: https://xkcd.com/2044/
           gtirloni wrote 15 min ago:
           If the new technology referenced in the comic provides a way
           to securely connect, including auditing, I don't see how it
           applies to the hole punching hack.

           paulddraper wrote 6 hours 2 min ago:
           Actuate

             ionspin wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
             I presume you meant to say "Accurate", but it made me think
             of a off-brand Picard that says "Actuate" instead of
             "Engage".

   neilalexander wrote 21 hours 31 min ago:
   We did spend a little bit of time documenting the earlier v0.3
   protocol, as you have linked, but the protocol has changed
   significantly in design twice since then. v0.4 changed the DHT quite
   a bit and v0.5 removed the DHT altogether. As a research project it
   likely will continue to change until we settle on a design we are
   happier with, at which point we will definitely spend more time
   documenting it.
   
   The need for ordered/reliable links is mostly for convenience of
   development at this stage, but that can be fixed for sure.

     godelski wrote 15 hours 8 min ago:
     Some documentation can help with those issues though. I find it
     helps more because you’re writing to yourself why you’re making
     certain decisions and it helps when you decide to make others. It
     just so happens that it’s also a great way to onboard people.

     Rhapso wrote 20 hours 51 min ago:
     Look at [1] if you want to try a chord dht again.
     
     Kademlia is a lot less intuitive, but by not ever assuming it's
     tables are correct, it handles and corrects inconsistency (and
     malicious nodes) better.
     
     Chapter 6 of this pile of (my) crap [2] talks about doing latency
     optimization on dht routing. Basically just embedding then network
     graph into a metric space.
     
     [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.06461
     [2]: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cs_diss/106/
 Its_Padar wrote 22 hours 43 min ago:
 Something else in this space includes the Reticulum Network Stack
 
 [1]: https://reticulum.network/
 PhilipRoman wrote 23 hours 1 min ago:
 I really like the idea of address being derived from public key, but
 there is a problem with this approach - since Yggdrasil currently uses
 IPv6 addresses, the length is very limited and you can find collisions
 (there is a workaround which involves brute forcing a key with more
 leading bits). As I understand, the long term plan is adding a custom
 protocol which has no limits for address length.

   neilalexander wrote 21 hours 22 min ago:
   Truncating the public key to fit in an IPv6 address isn’t totally
   ideal, agreed, but for now it means that just about any existing
   IPv6-capable application will work over Yggdrasil without
   modification, which is a nice property for a testnet.

     Retr0id wrote 19 hours 6 min ago:
     What about truncating a hash of the whole public key? (what's what
     I'd assumed was happening already)

   Its_Padar wrote 22 hours 41 min ago:
   Why not use the entire public key and let entropy do the rest, like
   the Reticulum Network?

   Retr0id wrote 22 hours 45 min ago:
   My napkin math says it'd be plausible to generate a pair of colliding
   addresses (birthday paradox etc.), but still implausible to collide
   with the set of existing in-use addresses. How much would the former
   actually matter, in the context of Yggdrasil?

 hahajk wrote 23 hours 8 min ago:
 Ok, so as I understand it, yggdrasil and cjdns are virtual P2P networks
 that offer the normal layer 3 routing services, but built on top of the
 existing internet. So they still require ISPs and internet backbones,
 etc.
 
 Are there any projects attempting to build a worldwide P2P network that
 can replace the IP layer? Like a mesh network that can operate without
 verizon, cisco routers, etc? I know of some mesh network technologies
 aimed at small disconnected networks but nothing consumer-facing and
 supporting anything more than a few thousand nodes.

   stackghost wrote 12 hours 0 min ago:
   Before cjdns a group of us started "project meshnet", inspired by
   Athens[0], to essentially replace or supplant the Internet.  At the
   time it was an idealistic/anarchic response to the Pirate Bay ruling
   back in 2009-2010.  IIRC cjdns came a bit later and subsumed most of
   the group.
   
   Who knew that a bunch of disgruntled hackers and software pirates
   building a shittier version of the Internet wouldn't last?
   
   [0]
   
   [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_Wireless_Metropolitan...
   rapnie wrote 21 hours 33 min ago:
   Maybe Irdest [0] mesh network.
   
   > Irdest is a networking research project that explores different
   technologies and ideas on how to build more sustainable,
   user-controlled communication networks.
   
   [0]
   
   [1]: https://irde.st/
   bityard wrote 21 hours 42 min ago:
   People have been dreaming of mesh networks forever. Unfortunately
   they scale very poorly (among other issues) and this is a fundamental
   limitation of their design. The Internet (ARPAnet) started out as a
   mesh network and the concept of trunks, backbones, and routing came
   about to solve those scaling issues.

     alexvoda wrote 1 hour 30 min ago:
     What are the reasons that make mesh networks scale poorly?

   progval wrote 21 hours 49 min ago:
   That was the original goal of cjdns, which is why it automatically
   peers with other nodes reachable over Ethernet (no IP needed),
   including WiFi (see the first paragraph of [1] ). Unfortunately, its
   approach to routing turned out to not scale in practice. Yggdrasil
   uses a different routing algorithm so it might.
   
   [1]: https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/blob/master/doc/Whitepape...
     neilalexander wrote 21 hours 20 min ago:
     Yggdrasil was actually inspired in part by cjdns but the design is
     very different. We care deeply about scale and we want an Yggdrasil
     network to be able to grow organically without requiring a strict
     hierarchy, huge amounts of state etc. We’re still working on it
     of course but for now the public test network is somewhere around
     5000-6000 nodes and continues to work pretty well as it grows.

   rolph wrote 21 hours 52 min ago:
   mesh over a starlink like system, but i think he would want a goodly
   sum for it.

   YesThatTom2 wrote 22 hours 20 min ago:
   IP was originally an overlay network on top of the telco network.
   
   That has many benefits most importantly it makes adoption easy.
   
   Now we run telco networks over IP for legacy apps.  If this Yggdrasil
   stuff is successful, I presume eventually we’ll run IP over it for
   legacy systems.

   ajsnigrutin wrote 22 hours 26 min ago:
   Why would you want to remove the IP layer?
   
   Or are you thinking about IP layer, just not on the "internet", but
   on a separate network? If this, then how do you suggest connecting
   people together? Mesh becomes innefficient due to mesh routing at
   larger sizes and sooner or later you just reinvent "your own
   internet", but not worldwide, because you don't have the resources to
   actually connect the whole world together.

     hahajk wrote 21 hours 7 min ago:
     In order to access the internet you are required to enter into a
     contract with a corporate entity. That's not because the internet
     is "theirs" (like Facebook's servers and systems are Meta's), but
     because the network layer was design with the assumption that
     companies would do the work of setting up ISPs, core routers,
     peering agreements, etc.
     
     I'd like to see a P2P protocol that doesn't assume this but instead
     is designed to be completely decentralized, and anyone running the
     protocol can join. This protocol would provide addressing routing
     like our current IP protocol, and TCP/UDP etc can run on top of it.
     Would this be a separate "internet" or could it have gateways to
     the proper internet? Preferably the latter. There are obvious
     technical challenges with routing, addressing, mobility, all in a
     decentralized way but are they truly impossible?

       toast0 wrote 18 hours 42 min ago:
       What you've described sounds a lot like running an AS with BGP.
       Yes, there's centralized allocation of ASNs and IP ranges.
       Otherwise, the whole thing is pretty decentralized, but you've
       got to figure out how to connect to peers and transit providers.
       
       Many peers will connect without a real contract, especially if 
       you're both present on a peering fabric, but transit usually
       needs a contract because transit isn't mutually beneficial.
       
       For some sort of overlay/alternative network, reliable transit
       seems highly likely to have a cost too. Probably not a contracted
       cost while it's experimental; and maybe optimistically, much
       lower than today's costs for IP transit, but still there would be
       a cost. Actually, IP transit costs are much lower today than
       years ago, but last mile transport costs are more important to
       your bill and running wires requires skilled labor and specific
       capital equipment, so it remains expensive; bandwidth capacity of
       wiring increases over time, but you still need one connection per
       home for best service; although wireless seems poised to reduce
       costs for good enough service in favorable conditions.

       DanAtC wrote 19 hours 38 min ago:
       Yggdrasil can do this but you have to bring the physical layer.

       ajsnigrutin wrote 20 hours 56 min ago:
       It's not nearly like that, it's designed that you can build your
       own, separate networks, before the concept of internet providers
       even existed (and a few colleges and DoD were the only users). It
       is completely decentralized (with the exception of DNS, which can
       be decentralized easily, but isn't).
       
       Setting up networks is easy and cheap. the expensive part is
       pulling cables and connecting people, that's why many countries
       have the local governments do that.  If you live in an apartment
       building, you can easily create a separate network for all the
       apartments. If you want to connect to the next building, you'll
       need a lot more cables and someone to actually dig in the cable
       or erect the poles and use those to carry the cable... but who
       will pay for that? What if you want to connect to the next city
       over... who will pay for the cabling, digging etc? And of course,
       the paperwork? Underseas cable? Good luck with that.
       
       It's not a protocol problem, it's a cost problem.

   bythreads wrote 22 hours 35 min ago:
   6lowpan was also a pretty nice attempt at overcoming some of the
   deficiencies - i think that operated on both lvl 2 and 3

   Communitivity wrote 22 hours 41 min ago:
   There was the Locker project by Jeremie Miller (XMPP), but it failed
   to gain traction and I think he pivoted into a more small scale
   commercial effort with it IIRC. The telehash protocol of Locker was
   extremely interesting.

   fragmede wrote 22 hours 48 min ago:
   It's a very romantic notion, but there's a lot of resources
   (time/money/hardware/effort) that go into the existing IP layer
   that's totally invisible. Without a plan on how to supplant those
   resources, any replacement network will struggle.

     lambdaone wrote 22 hours 37 min ago:
     I think the idea here is that somebody else runs an underlying IP
     layer, and this rides on top as an overlay network.
     
     You could, of course, run a local wireless IP layer and use this to
     route, but peer-to-peer wireless has well-known scaling problems.
     
     Still, it looks like a very interesting and reasonably well
     thoughout out idea.

   prussia wrote 22 hours 56 min ago:
   reticulum.network perhaps? It certainly fits the "replace the IP
   layer" requirement, and I believe in theory it can be very large
   scale, though unsure how it would do in reality.

   dartos wrote 22 hours 57 min ago:
   There’s meshtastic, but it’s not a full internet stack
   replacement iirc

     prurigro wrote 18 hours 8 min ago:
     It can do tcp/ip, but it's extremely slow. Like 5+ seconds for a
     character to appear over ssh with a direct connection.

   u8080 wrote 22 hours 59 min ago:
   There was cjdroute project with own OpenWRT-based Yggdrasil firmware
   for routers. But it seems failed to gain traction and died - [1] [in
   Russian]
   
   [1]: https://habr.com/ru/companies/cjdns/articles/198428/
 linsomniac wrote 23 hours 8 min ago:
 I was pretty excited about it 3-4 years ago, but it seems like it's
 kind of an abandoned project at this point.  Anyone making use of it
 and have any impressions?

   prurigro wrote 17 hours 36 min ago:
   I use it all the time to connect to my boxes at home when I'm out and
   about, and I chat with friends on an IRC server running on there.
   
   Development is pretty active, and the latest release just improved
   the routing algorithm by having it favour hops with the lowest
   latency which had a noticeable improvement.
   
   If you're looking for a big community hub within the network you
   might be disappointed (you could always try to set one up!), but
   there are a lot of people using it for their own purposes and the
   protect is far from abandoned.

   evbogue wrote 18 hours 49 min ago:
   Yggdrasil just works, so there is less of a need for developers to be
   in the chatroom discussing how to fix the problems with it.
   
   I use yggdrasil right now on all of my devices so I can ssh between
   them even if they are behind NAT.
   
   Using termux on android and the yggdrasil android app I can access
   files located on my home computer while I'm on the go without storing
   them in a cloud somewhere.

   neilalexander wrote 21 hours 35 min ago:
   Definitely not abandoned, but it’s a free-time project for myself
   and another developer. At the end of last year we released version
   0.5 with a new protocol design, and roughly a month ago released
   0.5.9 with link cost changes to dramatically improve network latency.

     linsomniac wrote 21 hours 29 min ago:
     Thanks for that update, you might want to post a quick blog update
     because that was where I was looking to see what the activity was. 
     I get it about free-time projects, I have some of those myself. 
     Thanks for your work on this, it is definitely very neat!

       PhilippGille wrote 19 hours 11 min ago:
       Why would you not look at the code repo for checking activity?
       There are so many active projects without regular blog posts.

         linsomniac wrote 14 hours 8 min ago:
         A reasonable question...  In English we read left to right and
         the "Blog" link was left of the "Github" link.    :-)  And I just
         didn't think about it once I saw the most recent blog post was
         from a year ago about an "upcoming 0.5 release" and no update
         on the release.  I'll admit, I did a half-assed job.

       neilalexander wrote 21 hours 24 min ago:
       One or two others have also asked for a project update on the
       blog so I’ll be sure to draft something up soon! :-) Thanks for
       your interest!

   DanAtC wrote 21 hours 54 min ago:
   There have been a few updates recently including a revival of the iOS
   app which had languished for some time.
   
   I use it as a VPN to connect my phone to my home network which are
   both peered privately to a VPS.
   
   It's a bit convoluted vs directly connecting to home, but it was
   easier to set up than worrying about dynamic IPs, port forwarding,
   and exchanging Wireguard keys.
   
   Multicast peering is neat in that I can access my home server
   directly using the same Ygg IP when I'm home. Problem is, I have to
   use an IP; the iOS app doesn't support configuring a custom DNS
   server for the Ygg VPN connection.
   
   Headscale is really a better solution for this use-case, but it's
   kind-of neat to know there's an alternative Internet available with
   just an additional peering.

     mrbluecoat wrote 18 hours 19 min ago:
     Agreed. If the Yggdrasil Android and iOS apps supported zero-touch
     MDM configuration like Tailscale, I'd try it out but my guess is
     the performance still wouldn't match WireGuard.
     
     Update: 83% comparitive speed using a US QUIC peer, not bad
     actually...

     sunshine-o wrote 20 hours 52 min ago:
     Using Yggdrasil as a mesh VPN for your devices could be a great use
     case.
     
     From a quick search it seems you do not even need a static IP
     address [0]
     
     I am not familiar with Yggdrasil and can't wrap my hear around how
     this is possible !
     
     - [0]
     
     [1]: https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/472679
       ravenstine wrote 14 hours 27 min ago:
       This is what I do at home. That way I don't have to fiddle with
       my router. This paid off in a way I didn't expect; when I got
       TMobile home internet I found out the router has almost no
       configuration, but all my devices could still be reached via
       their IPv6 addresses on my private Yggdrasil network.

       scottyeager wrote 16 hours 16 min ago:
       To join the larger public Yggdrasil network, you need to peer
       with at least one publicly reachable node. Most likely that
       machine has a static IPv4 address. There are a number of such
       nodes operated by volunteers, and they enable the magic that
       allows any device to join the network and immediately start
       receiving inbound traffic from the rest of the network. By
       opening an outbound connection to the public node, a channel is
       created for traffic to flow back to the non public node.

 fred_is_fred wrote 23 hours 12 min ago:
 I get why the name was used but if you start a project that you want to
 be heavily adopted, please pick a simpler name. The complexity of
 spelling or pronouncing this for most people creates an actual barrier
 to adoption. MP3 was easy to say and tell your friends about, Ogg
 Vorbis was not.

   ravenstine wrote 14 hours 7 min ago:
   Or people can just learn to pronounce Yggdrasil. Then again, how does
   it matter? If anything, an unusual name (relative to Latin languages)
   is more memorable. If it was called "Dogshit" I'd still use it.

   askvictor wrote 18 hours 1 min ago:
   I thought it was an knock-off brand sold on amazon

   neilalexander wrote 21 hours 25 min ago:
   The name wouldn’t necessarily stay if we succeed in our goals and
   formally specify a protocol, but for now it hasn’t really been much
   of a barrier in terms of interest or experimental deployments.

     aspenmayer wrote 12 hours 16 min ago:
     I think it's probably too late to change at this point, and
     changing it would probably not help in the ways you think. Just
     look at the freenet/hyphanet retroactive name change debacle by the
     original developer, for example, and how it has caused needless
     confusion and churn in that community.

   prmoustache wrote 21 hours 38 min ago:
   I am pretty sure most of the world can figure out how to ponounce
   yggdrasil much easier than how to pronounce infrastructure or
   litterature in english.
   
   [1]: https://youtu.be/RpCTu2ymqiM?feature=shared
     NemoNobody wrote 21 hours 21 min ago:
     Not once they have familiarity with the language at all.
     
     One of your examples has a word within a word, so it's like half
     pronounced if you can say "structure" which I think difficult to
     mispronounce.

       Tor3 wrote 5 hours 44 min ago:
       I've had English as my second language for many decades, most of
       what I do every day is in English, nearly 100% of what I read is
       in English, and most of what I watch or listen to is in English.
       And I have to speak English with all of my customers. English is,
       in that sense, absolutely as easy as my native language. I dream
       in English.
       Still: "Structure" and "literature" are hard to pronounce - or at
       least I'm sure I don't pronounce those words the way natives do.
       And that goes for a ton of words where the letters aren't either
       pronounced, or, alternatively, pronounced differently. But people
       with English as a second language don't have much problems
       pronouncing non-English words, like the Old Norse word in
       question. English is the weird one here, not the other way
       around.

       poincaredisk wrote 20 hours 12 min ago:
       Every kid learning English in my country will pronounce
       "structure" incorrectly at first, because it's similar to a word
       (with the same meaning) in my native language, and the correct
       English pronunciation of -ture doesn't make sense. I've looked up
       Yggdrassil pronunciation and... it's not surprising and I guessed
       the pronunciation correctly already?

         rustcleaner wrote 9 hours 47 min ago:
         >Yggdrassil
         
         Yggdrasil

   dizhn wrote 21 hours 45 min ago:
   mp3 is easy to say.. in English. "ogg" is much easier. i.e that was
   not the reason.

   opan wrote 23 hours 0 min ago:
   Ogg Vorbis seems very pronounceable to me, and without an obvious
   wrong way to say it, using an english language perspective.
   
   Yggdrasil is a wild one, though, agreed. Better a unique name than
   another thing called Gemini or Atom or something, though.

     majoe wrote 21 hours 0 min ago:
     The English language has the habit of taking perfectly fine Latin
     words and pronounce them in the most unintuitive way.
     
     Gemini is actually a good example, I rather take Yggdrasil.

     NemoNobody wrote 21 hours 44 min ago:
     No, Fred is right - it would better if it was atom or gemini,
     that's literally what he is saying.
     
     Yggdrasil - I just had to type the entire word out and even then
     autocorrect didn't tell me I had a word. I think the Mp3 vs Ogg
     Vorbis is perfect analogy.
     
     Tbh, I wouldn't use a Scandinavian language word for a global
     application as it will automatically frustrate any English as a
     second language users - the words defy practically all rules of
     English, they frustrate me even as no matter if I can read them, I
     often have no idea how to pronounce them unless I've already heard
     them said.
     
     This is one of those words I encountered many times before I first
     heard it said and actually knew how to say it.
     
     Fred is right 100

       cma wrote 12 hours 51 min ago:
       On the other hand I've only seen the Yggdrasil project once 3 or
       4 years ago.  The weird name and already visited link on my hn
       feed.. I did a doubletake for maybe 1 second thinking wtf is this
       and then immediately knew what it was without clicking, in a way
       that I definitely wouldn't have been able to if the project were
       named 'Atom.'

       anotherhue wrote 20 hours 58 min ago:
       To give a contrary opinion I think it's a beautiful world and an
       excellent gateway to one of our greatest mythologies. "The World
       Tree" is an aspect of human literary history.
       
       I'm not an ESL so I can only imagine the difficulties but I do
       not think we should be robbing the world of beauty, history and
       nuance for the sake of business English. Few English speakers can
       spell or pronounce it correctly so it even becomes a shared
       difficulty.
       
       Fun fact: several names of days of the week come from Norse
       mythology. Look up the names of the months if you want something
       more modern.

         F3nd0 wrote 18 hours 4 min ago:
         I have English as my second language and can't think of a
         single reason why foreign words should frustrate me. On the
         contrary, I feel like I have an advantage; since English
         spelling/pronunciation is very messy, coming from a language
         with more regularity (and just being multilingual in general)
         probably just makes non-English words feel more natural to me.
         
         One anecdotal example is the name of ‘GNU’. Somewhat often,
         I see English speakers on the internet mock the name for being
         difficult or odd to pronounce, and they usually end up
         explaining it by writing ‘guh-noo’, which somehow clarifies
         the matter. To me, ‘GNU’ reads naturally, I find the
         official explanation ‘like “grew” but with an “n”’
         very clear, and I can’t fathom how ‘guh-noo’ can feel
         more clear or comfortable to anyone, because to me it just
         looks utterly ridiculous. So for deviating from English, I have
         a hard time seeing a background in other languages as anything
         but an advantage.

       NemoNobody wrote 21 hours 36 min ago:
       Haha, I just realized I actually have used a  Scandinavian word
       in an app I intended for global use - I just respelled the word
       so that it made sense in English.

 poincaredisk wrote 23 hours 30 min ago:
 >Yggdrasil is a new experimental compact routing scheme
 
 Not that new anymore, right? It's at least 6 years old.

   1oooqooq wrote 23 hours 11 min ago:
   is anything using something similar?

     jeanlucas wrote 23 hours 7 min ago:
     by the original comment logic, everything that is older than 1
     moment is not new anymore

       poincaredisk wrote 20 hours 21 min ago:
       I wrote my comment, because I had to recheck if this is the same
       Yggdrassil I've read about 5 years ago. When I read about a new
       thing I also wonder will it be more popular in the future, and
       knowing it's already many years old reduces the chance of
       explosive growth in the future. At some point things just... stop
       being new.

         jeanlucas wrote 16 hours 5 min ago:
         I didn't mean to be mean to you, but in terms of network
         protocols something can be a new approach for a while,
         especially if others are still trying out. What is it compared
         to? TCP/IP is past 50 years old.
         
         Then again, I agree with you: it wasn't created yesterday.

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